[CHAPTER XIV]
Shifted
The battle sector southeast of Amiens and around Mondidier became quiet during the latter part of April and early May, and, true to Major Little’s predictions, he and the force under him had not much to do. There was still some local fighting. It would not be modern warfare without. Each side sought almost constantly to harass the other and to impress its enemy with its power and readiness. Still, there were a few casualties, so that the dressing stations, and operating room in the evacuation hospital were not idle, and a few ambulances were making almost continuous trips up and down the well-traveled highway.
Not far back of the road from Paris to Amiens the newly-begun American graveyard, with its regular cross-headboards, had grown somewhat. Its mounds were often decorated with roses, field poppies and wild flowers laid on them by the tenderhearted natives, mostly children. It was such sights, together with those of the ruined homes and shell-torn cities within reach of the German guns, that made the beholder pause and wonder how it was that humankind could permit war and its horrors.
The so-called second German drive of 1918 had been launched along the river Lys against Ypres and toward the Channel ports in early April. But it had proved a failure. The firm stand of the British wore out and finally stopped the Huns. Then, more and more furious at these repeated checks, the German High Command, with Hindenburg and Ludendorff at the head, shifted their offensive toward the south. If the British lion could not be separated from his ally, the French eagle, and slain at once then perhaps a supreme effort would gain the road to Paris. The threatened destruction of that city would surely bring victory to Germany and thus enable the kaiser to impose “peace at any price” upon the Allies.
Therefore, on the last day of April began the strengthening of the German line from Noyon to Rheims and a consequent push around Noyon. But the Huns made no progress and once more gnashed their teeth in preparation for a desperate onslaught. It was planned that this should break through at the long coveted points nearest their first objective, the city of Paris.
Just as the storm broke along the Oise and the Marne rivers, there came a surprise to the British, French and Germans. To the Huns it was like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky.
The Americans, under French direction, backed by French artillery, went over the top from hastily dug trenches, and made a counter-attack at Cantigny, which threw the enemy back nearly a mile. The Yanks, at the end of May, still held their positions, against the Huns most violent attacks.
Coming up the Paris-Amiens road on a bright morning—the first day of June—Don and Wash, carrying additional supplies for the dressing stations back of Cantigny, met a long line of yellow American lorries—no new thing now, but fraught with deep significance.